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Chocolatey turned 5 years old recently! I committed the first lines of Chocolatey code on March 22, 2011. At that time I never imagined that Chocolatey would grow into a flourishing community and a tool that is widely used by individuals and organizations to help automate the wild world of Windows software. It's come a long way since I first showed off early versions of Chocolatey to some friends for feedback. Over the last 2 years things have really taken off!

The number of downloads has really increased year over year!

Note: While not a completely accurate representation of usage and popularity, the number of downloads gives a pretty good context. Going up by 7 million and then by almost 30 million downloads in one year really shows a trend.

Note: The Chocolatey package has about 1,000 downloads per hour. I shut off the statistics for the install script back in October 2015 due to the extreme load on the site, so the number of Chocolatey package downloads is missing some of the statistics.

History

Let’s take a little stroll through some of the interesting parts of Chocolatey’s history. The history of Chocolatey really starts when I joined the Nubular (Nu) team in summer 2010.

January 2016 – Moderation backlog is reduced to near zero and is now manageable thanks to the automation.

February 1, 2016 – First Professional Licenses of Chocolatey are shipped to Kickstarters.

March 21, 2016 – CloudFlare caching tweaks introduced on the community repository to handle the increased pressure that will come from tab completion for package names.

March 23, 2016 – Virus scan results shown on the community repository for packages.

This doesn’t represent everything that has happened. I tried to list out and attribute everything I could find and remember. There have been so many amazing package maintainers over the years, there are too many of you to possibly list. You know who you are. You have made the community what it is today and have been instrumental in shaping enhancements in Chocolatey.

Looking to the Future

The community has been amazing in helping Chocolatey grow and showing that there is a need that it fills. Package maintainers have put in countless and sometimes thankless hours to ensure community growth and consumers have really found the framework useful! Thank you so much! The next version of Chocolatey is coming and it is going to be amazing. Here's to the next 5 years, may we change the world of Windows forever!